An flDemortam 
DR. JOHN SHAW BILLINGS 
Deputy Surgeon-General, U. S. Army 
(1838-1913) 
Dr. John Shaw Billings, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie 
Institution of Washington, director of the New York Public Library, and founder 
of the Index Medicus, died in New York City on March 11, 1913. 
Dr. Billings was bom in Switzerland County, Indiana, on April 12, 1838. He 
was graduated from the Miami University, Cincinnati, in 1857, receiving his A.M. 
in 1860 and his M.D. from the Medical College of Ohio, the institution founded 
by Daniel Drake, in the same year. In his reminiscences of “ The Medical College 
of Ohio before the War”1 he has left an interesting account of this period, of the 
controversies between the rival medical schools and professors, of the medical 
politicians, of the Old Commercial Hospital, “ with its pest house in the back yard,” 
of old St. John’s, “ with Sister Anthony and her devoted band of helpers,” and of 
“ the time when we were boys, scattered through the valleys of the two Miamis, 
through Indiana clearings and old Kentucky homes, and when a day hunt for 
squirrels and Bob White or a night expedition after coons was among the most impor- 
tant business of life.” “ In those days,” he says, “ they taught us medicine as you 
teach boys to swim,—by throwing them into the water.” After serving as resident 
physician at the St. John’s Hospital (1858-59) and the Commercial Hospital of Cin- 
cinnati (1859-60), and as demonstrator of anatomy in the Medical College of Ohio 
(1860-61), he passed the army examination in September, 1861, and here, as he re- 
marks, his real post-graduate course began, in “ the four years of the war, with its 
service in camps and hospitals, with battlefields for the great clinics,—a long, weary 
course.” During the Civil War, his record for courage and ability was of the best, 
and the end of the great struggle found him medical inspector to the Army of the 
Potomac, with a brevet of lieutenant-colonel, “ for faithful and meritorious services ” 
(1865). Being in charge of Cliffbume Hospital, near Georgetown, July 3, 1862, 
assisted by sixty Sisters of Charity, he took care of many Union and Confederate 
wounded from the seven days before Richmond, and did nearly all of the operating. 
At Chancellorsville, he and his assistants worked night and day, under artillery 
fire, in feeding and taking care of the wounded; at Gettysburg, his experiences were 
the same, and in both battles he did an enormous amount of surgical work. During 
the war, he performed nearly all the major operations done in the pre-Listerian 
period, and he was the first surgeon in the war to attempt the rare operation of 
excision of the ankle joint (January 6, 1862), with complete recovery of his patient. 
On December 21, 1864, he was assigned to duty in the Surgeon-General’s Office, and 
here the most important work of his life began. In the reminiscences above quoted, 
he has told of his student aspirations “ to try to establish, for the use of American 
physicians, a fairly complete medical library, and in connection with this to prepare 
a comprehensive catalogue and index which should spare medical teachers and 
writers the drudgery of consulting ten thousand or more different indexes or of turning 
over the leaves of as many volumes to find the dozen or so references of which they 
might be in search.”2 When Dr. Billings took hold of this work, the Surgeon-General’s 
Library, a mere office outfit of books in Surgeon-General Lovell’s time (prior to 1836), 
contained a little over 1,000 volumes. When, in 1895, he was retired from the 
army at his own request to become Professor of Hygiene at the University of Penn- 
sylvania, the library contained 308,445 volumes and pamphlets and 4,335 portraits. 
At the present time it contains upwards of half a million volumes and over 5,000 
portraits, and has the most unique collection of medical periodicals in the world. 
The work of indexing the periodicals was begun in 1872, and, during Dr. Billings’s 
1 Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic, 1888, n. s., xx, 297-305. 
! Op. cit., 297. incumbency, was accomplished in this wise: Almost every evening, a government 
van would leave a wagonload of medical journals at his private residence, and, the 
next day, these would be taken back to the library with the material for indexing 
properly checked; the day was spent in attending to administrative duties and in 
training the clerical force (most of them old hospital stewards) in the work of index- 
ing cards and preparing copy. In 1876, Dr. Billings published a “ Specimen Fasci- 
culus of the Catalogue ” of the Library, consisting of a combined index of authors 
and subjects, arranged in dictionary order in a single alphabet, which was submitted 
to the medical profession for criticisms and suggestions. Shortly afterward, Dr. 
Robert Fletcher was assigned to duty in the Library and became the principal 
assistant in the work of preparing and printing the Index Catalogue, the first volume 
of which, a large quarto of 888 pages, was published in 1880. The value of this 
huge undertaking, an unusual thing to come out of a new country, was soon acknowl- 
edged by the medical profession all over the world. In the first series (1880-95) 
the material was selected and the scientific classification made by Billings, while 
Fletcher gave to the proof-reading his rare scholarship and critical acumen. After 
Dr. Billings’s retirement, the classification, redaction, and proof-reading of the second 
series was superintended by Dr. Fletcher up to the time of his death (1896-1912). 
Dr. Billings’s administrative successors in office, all of them army surgeons especially 
selected for their medical knowledge and general culture, were two Massachusetts 
men, Colonel David L. Huntington, a Yale graduate, and Major James C. Merrill, 
of Harvard, the latter well known for his work in ornithology: and two Virginians, 
Major Walter Reed, and Colonel Walter D. McCaw. Under Colonel McCaw’s 
administration, the scope of the library has been greatly enlarged, its personnel 
highly improved, and the completion of the unique collection of medical classics has 
been especially fostered. In this way, many lacunae in the first series, which, as 
Dr. Billings always maintained, is not a complete bibliography, but a bibliographical 
conspectus of the contents of a great library, have been filled. As a monthly supple- 
ment to the Index Catalogue, the Index Medicus was begun by Dr. Billings and Dr. 
Fletcher in 1879, as an extra-official publication, the work of copying the library 
cards for redaction having been parceled out, as the celebrated Haller did with his 
eighteenth century bibliographies of medicine, among the wives and daughters 
of the office force, as private work. In 1903 the second series of the Index Medicus 
was started under the patronage of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with 
Dr. Fletcher as editor-in-chief (1903-1911). 
During his career in the Surgeon-General’s Office, Dr. Billings became widely 
known as an authority on military medicine, public hygiene, and vital statistics, and 
an expert in hospital construction. In 1875, the plans which he submitted for the 
construction of the proposed Johns Hopkins Hospital, based upon a careful study 
of European institutions of the time, were selected by the committee as the best 
out of a group of five, and, under his direction, this splendid institution was built 
upon the pavilion system and opened on May 7, 1889. Dr. Billings’s original 
recommendations,1 novel at the time, included not only the care of the sick poor but 
the graded accommodation of pay and private patients in rooms or suites of rooms, 
proper education of physicians and nurses, and, above all, the promotion of “ dis- 
coveries in the science and art of medicine, and to make these known for the general 
good.” He insisted that the out-patient department should be connected with the 
building set apart for the instruction of students and separated from the adminis- 
tration buildings; that clinical instruction should be mostly given in the wards and 
out-patient department and not in an amphitheater except in the surgical unit; 
that medical cases should not be brought from beds to an amphitheater; that there 
should be two pharmacies and a training school for nurses; and that a perfect system 
of records, financial, historical, and clinical, should be kept. Under these wise rulings, 
great advances in medical teaching were made, from the start, by the brilliant group 
of Johns Hopkins professors, Osier, Welch, Halsted, and Kelly. Billings, with Welch, 
organized the medical school. As Osier says, “ Dr. Billings’s counsel was always 
sought, and the growth of the school was a matter of pride to him. For years he 
lectured on the history of medicine.” 
Apart from the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Billings supervised the planning 
and administration of the Barnes Hospital (Soldiers’ Home, D. C.), the Army Medical 
Museum, the Laboratory of Hygiene and the William Pepper Laboratory of Clinical 
Medicine in Philadelphia, the New York Public Library, which he blocked out with 
his own hands (1897),2 and he made the original plans of the Peter Bent Brigham 
1 Hospital Plans. Five essays . . . for the use of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. New York, 
1875, 3-11, passim. 
* Library Journal, New York, 1911, xxxvi, 238. Hospital in Boston. He reorganized the United States Marine-Hospital Service, 
in 1870; was vice-president of the National Board of Health (1879-82); and played an 
important part in handling the yellow fever epidemic at Memphis. During his 
active life, he was in constant request as an expert adviser in hospital construction 
and the sanitation of cities. He was the author of important bibliographies of 
cholera (1875) and alcoholism (1894), many special reports on public hygiene and 
military medicine, published a treatise on ventilation and heating (1884), which was 
republished in enlarged form (1893), got up a useful dictionary of English, French, 
German, Italian, and Latin medical terms (1890), and made several valuable reports on 
the vital and medical statistics of the United States, in connection with the tenth and 
eleventh census. As professor of hygiene at the University of Pennsylvania (1891-96), 
he did good work in the organization and administration of the two laboratories 
planned by him, but the final achievement of his life was the completion of the 
New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, of which he became director in 1896. 
The consolidation of the Astor, Lennox, and Tilden foundations with the special 
endowments of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, amounting to $5,200,000, has resulted in a 
collection of over two million volumes, with upwards of fifty branch libraries and a 
staff of 1,002 persons. 
Dr. Billings was one of the organizers of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 
a member of the Executive Committee from the beginning, and chairman of the 
Board of Trustees from 1903 on. Concerning this phase of his work, Mr. Root, his 
administrative colleague, said in his resolutions of March 21, 1913, “ His breadth 
of learning and of interest in all departments of knowledge, his sturdy and fearless 
independence of character, and the safeguarding influence of his experience have 
been of inestimable value during the experimental and formative period of the 
Institution, of whose future usefulness his service will be one of the chief foundations.” 
In September, 1862, Dr. Billings married Miss Kate M. Stevens, who died in 
1912. He is survived by four daughters and his son, Dr. John S. Billings, Jr., 
whose work in the New York Health Department is well known. 
Dr. Billings was an active or honorary member of a large number of medical 
and scientific societies, and honorary degrees were conferred upon him by the univer- 
sities of Edinburgh (1884), Harvard (1886), Oxford (D.C.L., 1889), Munich (1889), 
Dublin (1892), Budapest (1896), Yale (1901), and Johns Hopkins (1902). On 
November 30, 1895, a banquet was given in his honor in Philadelphia, with the 
unique tribute of a purse of $10,000 by 260 members of the profession in Great 
Britain and the United States. From a surplus of this fund, a fife-size portrait 
was painted by Cecilia Beaux, of Philadelphia, which now hangs in the Surgeon- 
General’s Library. 
As a contributor to medical literature, Dr. Billings was distinguished by rare 
common sense, keen perceptions, a lively vein of humor, and remarkable surety of 
judgment. His wise and witty address on “ Our Medical Literature,” delivered 
at the International Medical Congress in London (1881) made a deep impression, 
and it was followed by a number of similar discourses, equally good, such as that 
delivered before the British Medical Association in 1886, his Cartwright Lectures 
on vital and medical statistics (1889), his address at the opening of the Johns Hopkins 
Hospital (1889), and his many papers on medical education, public health, and medical 
bibliography. His address to the graduating class of Bellevue Hospital Medical 
College (1882)1 is a delightful burlesque of the platitudes usually delivered by the 
valedictorian and the deliverer of diplomas, and his discourse on “ Waste,” on 
commencement day at his old alma mater, Miami University (1895), is full of 
Emersonian wisdom. His lectures on medical history were never published 
except in the case of an introductory lecture on medical folklore, delivered before 
the Lowell Institute in 1888,2 which is a most original contribution to the subject. 
His most interesting publications in this field are his “History of Surgery” (1895),* 
which still remains the best work on the subject in English, absolutely accurate as to 
facts, dates, and critical judgments; and his survey of the medical literature and 
institutions of the United States up to the year 1876,4 which marked a great advance 
upon the earlier kind of florid, uncritical writing upon this theme. A just but 
kindly critic of American medicine, Billings emphasizes the true worth of such men 
as Daniel Drake, Gerhard, or the elder Mitchell, and closes with this dignified message 
of hope: 
1 Medical News, Philadelphia, 1882, xl, 285-288. 
1 Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1888, cxviii, 29; 57. 
* In Dennis and Billings: System of Surgery, New York, 1895, i, 17-144. 
4 American Journal of Medical Sciences. Philadelphia, 1876, n. s., lxxii, 439-480. “ The defects in American medicine are much the same as those observed in 
other branches of science in this country, and to a great extent are due to the same 
causes. 
“Culture, to flourish, requires appreciation and sympathy, to such an extent, at 
least, that its utterances shall not seem to its audience as if in an unknown tongue. 
“We have no reason to boast or to be ashamed of what we have thus far accom- 
plished; it has been but a little while since we have been furnished with the means 
of investigation needed to give our observations that accuracy and precision which 
alone can entitle medicine to a place among the sciences properly so-called; and we 
may begin the new century in the hope and belief that to us applies the bright 
side of the maxim of Cousin, * It is better to have a future than a past.’ ” 
In person, Dr. Billings was of tall and powerful build, a commanding figure, with 
a handsome head and clear, open blue eyes. His was the masterful temperament, 
absolutely firm, independent, and self-reliant, the temperament of the great organizer, 
administrator, and man of affairs, and, in certain situations, he had perhaps some 
of the faults of an imperious nature. But he was absolutely honest and sincere, there 
was nothing small or mean about him, and if he expressed dislike or incurred enmity, 
he did so,in a bold, forthright way, in the jocund spirit of the man of Viking physique. 
In all relations, he upheld the honorable Saxon tradition of playing the game of life 
according to its ethical rules and seeing to it that others did the same, but his aggressive 
temperament was usually veiled by a patient and thoughtful courtesy. Thus he 
came to be looked up to and sought after everywhere as, that rare thing in modern 
fife, an absolutely reliable man. “ He was quite simple and sincerely modest, 
although this did not prevent an amused but quite magnanimous contempt for 
mere talkers,” says one of his old friends, Dr. J. Y. W. MacAlister, of London, who 
adds, “ He undertook tasks, and carried them through, which ordinary men attempt 
only by means of committees, institutions, societies, ‘ cooperations,’ and a vast 
amount of fuss and noise. His plan was simplicity itself. If the thing were worth 
doing, he simply did it. . . . He had done a big fife’s work when he was called to 
come and administer the great New York Public Library, and he tackled it on his 
own principle — without fuss or unnecessary publicity; he just ‘began,’ and each 
day’s herculean ‘ chore ’ saw him miles on his way to triumphant success.”1 Of 
his early days in the Surgeon-General’s Library, Professor Franz von Winckel 
wrote: “ Die Arbeitskraft dieses Mannes ist schier unglaubfieh und wer ihn, umgeben 
von seinen zahlreichen Mitarbeitem in seiner kleinen engen Werkstatte in Washing- 
ton besucht und mit ihm das Army Medical Museum — auch zum grossten Theil 
seine Schopfung — durchwandert hat, wird von Bewunderung fur diesen Heroen 
unserer Wissenschaft erfiillt sein.”2 This was the Billings, always “ from strength 
to strength advancing,” of whom we of the Surgeon-General’s Office are so justly 
proud. 
A great organizer and pioneer, his name will always stand among the highest 
in our medical history as one of those who have dared greatly and achieved greatly 
for the advancement of scientific medicine in this country. 
F. H. G. 
‘British Medical Journal, London, 1913, i, 642. 
* Mtinchener medizinische Woohenschrift, 1887, xxxiv, 10.